Jonathan Edwards: ‘I wonder what my life would be like without golf’

There were clues in Jonathan Edwards’ childhood that he would become immersed in the game of golf one day.

He played pitch-and-putt with his parents on holiday, and his favourite moment from the Open Championship has always been Seve Ballesteros’ iconic winning celebration at the Old Course from 1984.

What followed instead was a legendary athletics career in which he won three Gold Medals across the Olympics and the World Championships in the triple jump. He broke the world record twice in 20 minutes in 1995. Remarkably, the record still stands today.

“I enjoy the challenge of it,” Edwards told NCG during The 153^rd Open at Royal Portrush. “I did lots of training when I was competing, and there’s something about going back to my roots of like being on the range and trying to perfect a technique and getting better and then seeing that hard work pay off on the golf course.

“It’s very similar to being an athlete. There’s something about me which is regressing by being a golfer, going back to what I was when I was an athlete, obviously not nearly as good, but the process is similar. I think the biggest thing is actually this group of friends and this social network that I have around golf.”

The 59-year-old from Westminster is in Northern Ireland fulfilling his role as an R&A Global Development Ambassador, while also helping with the scoring of the tournament, both in the mechanical leaderboards and remotely double-checking the numbers inputted by the scorers inside the ropes.

“I met Phil (Phil Anderton, Chief Development Officer for the R&A) in St Andrews. I bumped into him, and he said it’ll be nice to get you involved. We played golf together, and then he said, ‘Would you like to become an ambassador?’

“It wasn’t a difficult decision to make, and I love golf,” Edwards added, who is a member of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and a 2-handicapper. “I feel evangelistic about its benefits. He took me through all the health research.”

(All images: R&A)

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Once a world-class athlete at the peak of his discipline with a regular routine of intense training, it is quite something for a man like Edwards to be taken aback by the health benefits of golf. Now, he is directly involved in promoting said benefits with the Walk to Win campaign.

Spectators at Portrush can track their steps on The Open App. At the 2024 Open at Royal Troon, over 6,700 people took part and walked over 168,753,944 steps. The winner will get the chance to play with Edwards at Portrush.

“It just highlights golf as a great way of keeping fit and this is not just playing, but spectating as well. The R&A has done a huge amount of research into the benefits of playing golf, through physical health, but also for mental health.

“There’s also been a lot of research which talks about the benefits of just walking as opposed to running. You’ve got the added dimension of actually swinging as well for energy consumption. It’s well documented now that golf is good for you.

“When I first started playing golf, the received wisdom was that actually, if you look at the health benefits, this is not the way to get them, whereas now I think that’s being flipped on his head.

“It is an incredible privilege, and in a sport that wasn’t my original sport, it feels an even greater responsibility, because I haven’t had years and years of playing as a professional and I’ve stepped out into golf. It’s wonderful,” he added about being an R&A Global Development Ambassador.

“I genuinely mean it, I do wonder what my life would be like without golf.”

Edwards first announced himself on the world scene with a Silver Medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1990 in Auckland. Three years later, he won Bronze at the Worlds in 1993 in Stuttgart and then it was two years later in Gothenburg when he became the first man to jump over 18 metres. His world record is 18.29 metres.

His second Gold Medal at the Worlds came in Edmonton in 2001, a year after he won his sole Olympic Gold Medal in Sydney. Edwards knows more than anyone what level of dedication is required to reach the top and, while he shares this knowledge with the stars on the Dunluce Links fairways, he believes the twists and turns inside each sport unfold differently.

Jonathan Edwards: Golf and athletics are both similar and different

“There are lots of similarities in terms of the dedication, the sacrifice and preparation and all of that. Indeed now, golfers have become much more dynamic and athletic, and a lot of the latest research for hitting it a long way is about explosive power, which is what I was all about.

“The TPI (Titleist Performance Institute) guys say that the biggest indicator of how far you can hit a ball is your vertical jump, with pushing off and up. Actually, my vertical jump’s not that good! I was much better horizontally with speed.

“Golfers are becoming athletes, and they’re working in the gym and working on their explosive power, which is what I did. What is different is the actual sport itself, and being out on the course for five hours, five and a half hours. You can hit the best tee shot you’ve ever hit on the first hole and what does it count for? One shot.

“Whereas in athletics, I jump a fantastic jump, and then I win the competition. I don’t have to do anything else. The mental challenge of golf is different, and I find that hard because it just goes on and on for so long, whereas with mine (athletics), it could just be an instance.”

Like Edwards alludes to, his jumps were done in a flash which is an unrelatable trait with the sport of golf, much to many people’s ire. Slow play is an issue at the top level, which has never and will never go away.

With a hop, skip, and a jump, the Olympic final was over for Edwards and his competitors, and he believes the stars at The Open could perform just as well if they showed similar haste.

(All images: R&A)

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“You see them out there with their TrackMan and their GCQuad monitors. You see them putting, and it’s almost like death by analysis. It almost brings a paralysis in doing that, and that’s why pace of play is what it is. It’s just too much thinking.

“You are at your best when you’re not thinking, and it is just automatic. You feel for most of these golfers, they could go around in an hour and a half less, and they could still shoot the same score. But there’s just something within the whole culture of golf and the way that it’s coached, the way that it’s approached which has made it so mechanical, they can’t be free.

“If we look at the likes of Rory McIlroy when he gets out there, a very natural golfer. He could probably shoot around 62 around here (Portrush) in three hours. But it has become a culture in professional golf, which is slow.”

Edwards is an admirer of McIlroy, and believes he is one of the biggest names in global sport. He is also a huge fan of Scottie Scheffler, the World No.1 in the men’s game, who is now three majors deep into a career that appears to have endless potential.

He attributed part of Scheffler’s excellence to his faith, which streamlined his own focus during his athletics career. Edwards even took his dedication to Christianity to the point where he withdrew from the 1991 Worlds as he refused to compete on Sundays at that stage of his career.

“In some ways, it becomes part of your psychology for dealing with the pressure. I think subconsciously, your mind finds ways to just ratchet down the pressure a little bit.

“My faith certainly helped me do that, to deal with the pressure. It gave me a framework with dealing with the pressure. It gave me a framework for my motivation. I wasn’t doing it for myself, I was doing it for my faith. It was a very much an integral part of how I competed.

“It’s out of your hands. You do the best with what you’ve got, and the result is separate from that. Winning wasn’t the be-all-and-end-all of those things, and no matter what happened, my worth as a person wasn’t the penalty of the result. There was a whole bunch of stuff that the Christian narrative gave me which made it much easier to go out and compete.”

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